We were delighted to welcome a group of Business and Enterprise students from Pearson College to our BlackBerry Tech Centre in Slough on Friday, June 21st.

We spent the morning talking to them about the great opportunities that are available on the BlackBerry 10 platform, what an app developer needs to consider from a business and marketing perspective when taking their app to market, and what it takes to create a successful app on our platform.

After the presentations from the EMEA developer relations team we handed the reigns over to the students and set them a fun challenge. They were given two and a half hours to come up with an app concept and build out a marketing plan for it. At the end of the time they pitched their ideas to a BlackBerry panel. Needless to say there were some really cool ideas coming out of the group and choosing a winner was really tough. But in the end we narrowed it down and the winning team had given us a great presentation on their app idea, “Child Classes”.

The winning team went away with a brand new BlackBerry Z10 device and all the teams were keen to find out how they could take their ideas forward. We sincerely hope to see some really great applications come out of the groups!

The BlackBerry® Developer Relations team here at Research In Motion® (RIM®) continues to make amazing strides in reaching out to the developer community. This weekend – March 30th and 31st – we’ll be hosting a HTML5 hackathon for students with Pace University in New York City. We collaborated with Pace University to create an opportunity for students to learn how to develop in HTML5 and take mobile apps to the next level with our BlackBerry® WebWorks™ platform.

Adam Stanley, Patrick Mollins and Erik Oros from the Developer relations team will be on-hand to help guide students as they work with the BlackBerry platform and to give them some tips and tricks, as well as lead some sessions to help these developers gain insight into our web tools.

Students can choose to develop an HTML5/BlackBerry WebWorks application around one of the topics suggested by RIM experts prior to the event or use their own imagination to come up with an app idea and work under RIM experts’ guidance to implement it as a BlackBerry smartphone or BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet app. A total of three winners will be selected by a jury of three-five experts from Pace University and RIM at the end of the two days and recognized with prizes including free participation at one of RIM’s upcoming developer conferences.

We’re hoping that at the end of the event, students will have a working prototype or full-fledged BlackBerry application which leverages HTML5/BlackBerry WebWorks technology.